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Right. Also, for those language designers trying to figure out if the right white space is 'tab' or 'space', just do a quick DDG for 'tab' and 'Makefile'. The a
by thechao 6y ago
Right. Also, for those language designers trying to figure out if the right white space is 'tab' or 'space', just do a quick DDG for 'tab' and 'Makefile'. The answer is space.
- franga2000 6y agoAre your referring to the fact that Make requires tabs to indent blocks of commands? It's not even whitespace in that case - Makefile treats the character as a prefix. Sounds like it would be even worse if it required 4 spaces... I actually see Make's use of tabs a great example of why they make more sense for indentation, especially when it matters. 1 \t => +1 level of indentation. No guessing the number of spaces and praying it stays consistent throughout the file.
- thechao 6y agoI don't disagree with you from a language-designer point-of-view: it's an elegant, indentation-agnostic solution. The problem is that after explaining -- for the 50 gajillionth time -- that "it's a tab, not X spaces", I get a little frustrated.